I finished the blueprint spawners, but when I traveled my own world it felt void, empty and dark. Without life and color, depressing in every way. As beautiful as those screenshots in "Developer Diary 70" looked, they lacked in atmosphere and character.
In late 2014 I came up with my very first concept for Lakini's Woods. At the time I had been working with Unreal Engine 3 and a couple of basic assets I took from the game "Thief 3". The idea was to set up the entire game as a forest maze, based upon a series of rooms that create the illusion of a very deep dark forest. I had no idea how to accomplish this at the time, but I managed to lay down a basic playable UE3 demo and created a couple of playable levels, that included zombies that would chase me throughout the woods:
The atmosphere and the overall feeling during gameplay was great. Each room had a white ceiling and a point light, which was responsible for "faking the sky". This concept had many advantages: It greatly limited the amount of foliage visible to the player, there were no lighting problems related to dynamic day/night rhythms and it gave me the opportunity to plan each segment and each room meticulously so I could optimize VR performance in every corner of the world.
I think I found a way to merge the original concept with the landscape segments and the world creator blueprint that I built throughout early 2017. Instead of landscape segments, the world creator spawns so called "forest-rooms" in predetermined sizes (500m / 1000m / 2000m a.s.o). They will now snap together and connect accordingly, creating a fluent tunnel-like maze. The dharmapala palaces and the villages are contained in very large rooms, that use an artificial sky sphere to create the illusion of a very large and open space. These large rooms can also be implemented into the world creator blueprint. I just may have found a way to get rid of all my problems ...
